stories of my family

Two nailors of Derryquin

William Hickson and George Byrne

I have known for some time that William Hickson (1832-1899) of Killorglin, who later migrated to America and then Australia, was a nailor. It says so clearly on his marriage certificate:

While looking through some records for George Byrne (1860-1929), who married William Hickson’s daughter Susie many years later in Australia, I discovered that his father, who was also named George, was also a nailor. It is recorded on George junior’s death certificate.

Death George Byrne:
July 28, 1929, Coast Hospital, Little Bay, Randwick
Late of 25 Cook Street, Lewisham
George Byrne, Clerk
69 years
Cerebral haemorrhage, Purpura haemorrhagica
Name and occupation of father: George Byrne, Nailor
Mother: Sarah Ruddle
When and where buried: 30 July 1929, Congregational Cemetery, Woronora
Name and religion of minister: William McFarlane, Brethren
Where born and how long in the Australian colonies, Killarney, Country Kerry, Ireland, 47 years
Place of marriage, age and to whom: Summerhill, 24, Susan Hickson
Children of marriage: Kathleen, Emily, Frances, William, Gertrude, Isobel. One male deceased.

This conflicts somewhat with a transcript of George’s birth record which I found through one of the genealogical search engines, which records his father as being a waiter:

I have wondered what it means, that he was a waiter. Killarney today may be full of restaurants with waiters but in 1860 when George was born it was probably not the tourist mecca that it is now. I have wondered if he was a waiter in a large hotel, or the house of an aristocratic family, but finding the answer has eluded me. What I suspect is that George’s father was not a waiter at all, but a nailor, as the later death record indicates, and that the above record contains a mistake in the transcription. The Irish Genealogy website does not contain an image of the original church record and the two words nailor and waiter could easily be confused.

George Byrne (senior) of Killarney has been an elusive character thus far in my family history research. I have not been able to find the date of either his birth or death, only his marriage in Killarney on 24 February 1857 to Sarah Ruddle. However, assuming he was around 25 at the time, he would have been born around 1832, the same year as William Hickson.

So George Byrne (senior) of Killarney, was a contemporary of William Hickson of Killorglin, and they were both nailors. However, whereas William would leave Ireland in 1865 and migrate to first America and then Australia, George lived out his whole life, as far as I know, in Ireland.

The nail and bolt industry

What is a nailor? It is not a trade or profession that is familiar to the modern reader. However, nailors were in great demand in the days before the manufacture of nails and bolts was automated in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was heavy work involving anvils and hammers and furnaces, somewhat akin to blacksmithing. Here is a description from industrial England which I found at a website cataloguing old occupations (http://rmhh.co.uk/occup/n-o.html):

In the early 19th century, in the neighbourhood of Birmingham alone, 60,000 people – men, women and children – were involved in the hand manufacture of iron nails. They turned out something like 200 tons of nails, of numerous varieties and levels of quality, every week. Commonly an entire family would work together, confining themselves to a particular class of nail.

There were about 300 sorts of wrought or forged iron nails alone. Specific names suggest the uses to which they were put – deck, wheelwright, hurdle, mop, etc. Further terms such as rose, clasp, diamond, pearl and sunken describe the shape of the nail head; and flat, sharp, spear, needle and refer to their points. The terms fine, bastard and strong described their thickness.

The very finest quality nails were used for horseshoes; each nail required at least 35 blows of the hammer to draw it out fine enough to prevent it from cracking or breaking off in the horse’s hoof. Most nails required at least 25 blows of the hammer to form them. When the shank had been drawn out from the red hot rod to the required length, it was inserted into a heading tool, cut, turned and struck on the anvil. During this process, the bellows had to be worked several times.

The workers who forged the nails on the anvil were known as Nailors or Naylors. Each could make as many as four nails a minute – that’s up to 3,000 a day.

What has happened to the traditional nail maker has happened to many other classes of industrial worker, who have seen their crafts swallowed up by automated processes or superceded by new inventions.

A book published in 1989 about nail making in the Midlands is called “Glory Gone: the Story of Nailing in Bromsgrove,” by Bill Kings & Margaret Cooper (Halfshire Books, 1989/1999).

‘Glory gone’ was the ironic comment of Bromsgrove’s last nailmaker on the area’s former staple trade. At its mid-nineteenth century peak it employed over three thousand people, 30 per cent of the population. Most of the physical evidence — the nailshops, cottages and warehouses — has long disappeared; but a visitor to the area one, even two, hundred years ago would have heard, seen and smelt the making of nails. This book tells the story of the hand wrought nail trade in the Bromsgrove area, examining the contrast between the prosperity of the sellers of nails, the masters and foggers, and the dreadful poverty of those who made those same nails, among them a high proportion of women and children. There is an account of the century-long struggle against low wages and the illegal truck system and a look at what nailers did when they were not toiling at the nailblock. Finally, there are short firsthand accounts recalling childhood days spent among nailers by four men and women who a decade ago were the last living links with the staple trade.

The Hickson and Byrne families

William Hickson married Mary Needham in 1858 in Templenoe, County Kerry (see marriage certificate). They were both 25. They had three children before migrating from Ireland to America in 1865. These Irish Hicksons were Richard (b.1859), Suzie (b.1861) and Lizzie (b.1863). The other three of their children, Sara, William and Charlie, were born in America, in the area near Boston where they lived. William worked, I believe, as a whitesmith. Then in 1877-78 they returned to Ireland for a short time before migrating again to Australia. During that short interlude in Ireland Suzie, my great grandmother, was around 16 years old. After moving to Australia I believe that William worked in his younger brother John’s timber company. The family appear to have been fairly well off. William died in 1899 but his wife Mary survived into the twentieth century and died in 1916 when the world was at war.

George Byrne married Sarah Ruddle in 1857 in Killarney. Their ages are not recorded on the marriage certificate. Information about their lives and family is scanty. I am uncertain of how many children they had, but I am aware of two sons who migrated to Australia: George (junior) was born in 1860 in Killarney (see above), and Richard around 10 years later in 1870. There were no doubt many others in between (and George junior may not have been the first) but I have no record of the others.

Where and when George and Sarah died and were buried is at present unknown to me, but I believe that George probably died before 1876, in his mid forties. I have a copy of a document recording George junior’s indenture to Roger Martin, a general merchant in Killorglin, in 1876. It is signed by George’s mother, Sarah Byrne, which suggests that his father was dead. George was 15 or 16 at the time and served Roger Martin for 5 years, after which he migrated to Australia. I suspect that Richard Byrne may have also been indentured to Roger Martin 10 years later, before he too migrated to Australia, but I have no evidence of this at present. I have previously written about a possible Richard Byrne-Roger Martin connection.

There are lots of commonalities in the Hickson and Byrne families. Both William Hickson and George Byrne (senior) were nailors. Both married around the same time – George first, to Sarah Ruddle, in 1857, and a year later William, to Mary Needham. Both couples appear to have been living in Killarney around 1860 and the years after that, since that is where William and Mary’s first three children were born, and where George and Sarah’s son George was born.

The two families were joined in 1885 when George junior, recently arrived in Sydney from Ireland married Suzie. George and Suzie Byrne were my mother’s Irish born grandparents. They had six children, five girls (one of whom was my grandmother) and a boy. George was a businessman and worked for IXL jams in Sydney. They were staunch members of the Brethren assemblies in Sydney.

The Brethren connection

It is this connection with the Brethren that fascinates me. The Hicksons and the Byrnes were both Protestant families in predominantly Catholic Kerry. In 1861 a revival broke out amongst the Protestants in Kerry, initially in the area around Templenoe where Mary Hickson (Needham) lived before her marriage to William Hickson. The revival resulted in the formation of Plymouth Brethren assemblies in Ireland. Mary’s family were profoundly affected by the revival – her four youngest brothers all became evangelists in North America, part of the spiritual awakening connected with DL Moody’s ministry. There seems little doubt that William and Mary were members of the Plymouth Brethren in Kerry before they departed for America, and that they carried this version of the Christian faith with them first to America and later to Australia.

George and Suzie Byrne, after they married in Sydney in 1885, raised a family in the strict traditions of the Brethren assemblies. The effects of this on their six children were not entirely positive – but that is another story. However, it indicates that George Byrne was almost certainly a part of the Brethren movement in Kerry prior to his migration to Australia in 1882. This in turn makes me fairly certain that his parents, George and Sarah, were part of a Brethren assembly in Killarney.

The two nailors of Derryquin

It is all conjecture, but all this leads me to the belief that William Hickson and George Byrne were friends in Kerry in the 1850s and 60s. They were the same age and were both nailors. William was from Killorglin and George from Killarney, but William lived in Sneem as a young man and it seems likely that he worked on the Derryquin Estate, near Sneem. I suspect his parents had taken the family there in search of work at the time of the Great Famine. William’s father was also a nailor. Although I have at present no evidence, I wonder if George Byrne also moved to Sneem during the late forties or early fifties. I like to believe that it was in Sneem and at Derryquin that William and George’s friendship was established. There is no doubt that the estate employed a number of nailors, as described by TE Stoakley in his book, Sneem, the Knot in the Ring:

Derryquin formed a community that was largely self-supporting. There was timber in plenty and a saw pit where sawyers were kept busy converting the logs into the planks, boards and scantlings for the carpenter’s shop where doors and sashes were made and all the innumerable odds and ends of estate joinery were done. There was a forge where the tenants horses were shod and all the general smithy work was done, even the manufacture of bolts and nails. (p.77)

William met his future wife in Sneem. Her name was Mary Needham and she was the oldest daughter of the Needham family of Templenoe, a village just a few miles east of Sneem toward Kenmare. William married Mary in 1858, but by that time, according to their wedding certificate, William was living in Killarney. Their first three children were all born in Killarney.

George actually married the year before William, in 1857. His wife was Sarah Ruddle, and church records show that they married in Killarney. Whether Sarah was a Killarney girl from the beginning or not is uncertain. I have little knowledge of George and Sarah’s children, but I know that they had at least two sons born respectively in 1860 and 1870, in Killarney. They were named George and Richard, and both would end up migrating to Australia, George in 1882 and Richard about 10 years later.

Both the Hicksons and the Byrnes seem to have been quite impacted by the Kerry Revival that broke out in Templenoe and Sneem in 1861, even if both young families were by that time living in Killarney. The two families may have been part of the same Brethren assembly in Killarney in the early 1860s.

Separation

But then William and Mary and their young family decided to emigrate, and were thus separated from their friends George and Sarah and their children, who stayed behind in Kerry. The Hickson children grew up near Boston in the USA while the Byrne children grew to maturity in County Kerry.

Then in 1877 the Hicksons came back. Sadly, William’s old friend George had died a few years before and Sarah was a young widow. How she fed her family I have no idea, though her son George, who was in the first year of his apprenticeship in Killorglin to the general merchant, Roger Martin, would have been helping pay the bills. But it must have been exciting for her to meet her old friends, William and Mary, and for the children of the two families to get to know each other. Three of the Hickson children had never seen Ireland before, and there were several Byrne children who had not been born when William and Mary had left with their little family in 1865.

Suzie Hickson was 16 when they came home, just a year younger than George and Sarah’s oldest son, George. I have a feeling that the seeds of a romance between George and Suzie were planted during that short sojourn of the Hickson family in Ireland, those few fleeting months before the Hickson family emigrated for the second time, this time to Australia. I suspect that it was in those months that George decided his future. He would serve his time with Roger Martin and support his mother and siblings, but then he too would emigrate. He realised that his destiny lay in Australia, with the girl who had captured his heart, his Irish-American-Australian sweetheart. But it would be five long years before he would see her again.

Sarah Byrne, however, would never see her friends William and Mary Hickson again. As far as I can discern neither William (who died in 1899) nor Mary (who survived until 1916) ever returned to Ireland, and Sarah never saw Australia. The two nailers of Derryquin had waved farewell to each other for the last time in 1865 when the Hicksons left for America. In 1878 their wives did the same, as the Hicksons sailed away again, for a new life in Australia.

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2 thoughts on “Two nailors of Derryquin”

I am a great-granddaughter of Sarah Ruddle and George Byrne – their son James born Killarney 1866 was my maternal grandfather. They lived in Aghadoe, Killarney (I had a short visited there a few weeks ago). Sarah was sextoness of the local church in which her father William Ruddle was parish clerk. Pop Byrne died some years before my birth. I didn’t know about Richard, but George and Sarah also had a daughter Hannah. Sadly I can’t find Pop Byrne’s (James) birth certificate as many of the records were sent to Dublin for safe keeping and the building there was burned and all the records lost. In trying to find the date of Pop Byrne’s arrival in Sydney, I came across your blog and have no doubts that George jnr and James were brothers.

If you are interested I was able to take photos of the outside of the church in Aghadoe, but sadly it too has had a fire and is boarded up, though the exterior is intact.

Hi Barbara! Wow, exciting to come across another Byrne descendant. Of the three Irish families in my family tree the Byrnes have been the hardest to find any information on. My great grandfather was George Byrne, as mentioned in the blog, and he married Suzie Hickson. George’s younger brother was Richard. I have not been able to find any records for when they arrived in Australia but I think it was around 1882 and 1892 respectively.

Richard wanted to marry Alice Hickson, Suzie’s cousin, but was presented from doing so by Alice’s father. However, many years later Richard and Alice did marry, after their respective spouses had died.

Until your message today I have known nothing of any others of the Byrne siblings from Killarney. So it seems James Byrne was your great grandfather, as George Byrne was mine. And from what you say George, Richard and James had a sister Hannah. Do you know what happened to her?

As for their parents, George and Sarah, I have guessed that they were friends with William and Mary Hickson, parents of Suzie, as I wrote in the blog above, “two nailors of Derryquin,” but it is conjecture really. This is based on my great grandfather’s death certificate, which says that George Byrne senior was a nailor, as was William Hickson.

You have given me some information about Sarah and her family (the Ruddles). Do you have anything more on her husband George, or his ancestry? I would love to see the pictures you took of the church in Aghadoe. And any other documents you find about the family would also be welcome. I can send anything I find to you too, if you are interested. Incidentally, where are you? In Australia? My email, if it is easier, is holfies@gmail.com.